Hi,

I was having trouble adding users on my Fedora Server because I kept getting the message "cannot change password lock file" or "cannot change shadow lock file".

I removed password.lock and shadow.lock and I was still unable to add a user.

Then i did rm *.locks.

Now all of my user folders are gone. The disk space on the drive is still being used but the actual folder is nowhere to be found.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

your user folders? you mean the contents of /home? there isno way at all that deleting a lock file can do that... what does "ls -l /home" show? what else were you doing at the time?

Eh.. surely it's *possible* if you really want it to happen I'm thinking: a periodic check for a .lock file -> not found -> rm -rf /home/*

The way the server is set up, all the home folders are located at /home/personal/username.

When I do a ls -la in /home, the entire /home/personal folder is gone, thus bringing with it all of the individual user folders.

Now, the weird part is that the disk space is still being used. I did a df -h right before everything disappeared and then right after. It was exactly the same.

These folders are also Samba shares that Windows/Mac/Linux users can access. Maybe that has something to do with it?

I was thoroughly caught off guard when this happened because obviously this behaviour should not happen when deleting .lock files.

The only other thing I was doing at the time was untarring an archive file. This was going into /home/personal/user/archivefile. I don't see how that would make a difference either, but you never know.

short of a disk failure, something else must have happened. this isn't windows, things don't happen without it being requested.

if ti's been moved to somehwere else, try searching the filesystem for a known file name...

Sounds like the kind of situation in which the mount point /home/personal exists, but the partition isn't mounted. ls /home/personal would show nothing. Mount the partition, eh voila, it's all there.

So, is /home/personal on a seperate partition, and is the partition mounted? Look in /etc/mtab for a quick check on the mount status.

I found my mysteriously disappearing home folders. For some unknown reason, when I removed the lock files the home folders were moved into the home folder of the new user I was trying to create. I just moved them back to their proper spot and voila, everything was as it should have been.

It was very strange, but thank you all for the very quick responses.